


Five Totems That Didn't Stick (And One Thing To Remember)

by Nny



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Canon Compliant, First Kiss, First Meetings, M/M, Totems
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-10
Updated: 2014-08-10
Packaged: 2018-02-12 13:49:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,990
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2112312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nny/pseuds/Nny
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Infamous,” Cobb’s companion says. Eames wants to call him Otto; there’s something about the combed lines carefully gelled into his hair that brings to mind aquatic mammals and David Attenborough’s soothing voice.  </p><p>“Infamy,” Eames intones mournfully, “they’ve got it in for me.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Totems That Didn't Stick (And One Thing To Remember)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bleep0bleep](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bleep0bleep/gifts).



> Eames' line and all italicised words from part three are quoted from _Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead_ by Tom Stoppard. I claim no ownership of them and make no profit from their use.

**1.**

Currently there’s a warehouse around him. It looks to be built of breezeblocks and corrugated iron, held together with rust, but it might as well be made of the hole in his pocket and strung together with cobwebs for all the good it does in keeping the weather off. Eames shifts his chair out from under another newly sprung leak (nearly losing one of the crappy wheels in the process) and settles back into a comfortable sprawl, cards shuffling quietly between his hands, just in time to look suitably nonchalant when one of the doors judders into a position almost resembling open. 

“Eames,” Cobb says flatly, just as soon as he’s finished wrestling with the door. The bloke with him – smaller, sleeker, frown practically tattooed onto his face – gives him a sideways look. 

“Eames?” There’s a wealth of meaning in that tone of voice, and just because he can’t decipher it doesn’t mean it’s not appreciated. He can’t wait to find out what the (now he takes the time to looks closer) really quite attractive young man’s heard. 

“Eames,” says Eames. Why break a trend? “Have we been telling tales outside of school?” 

“Your name gets around,” Cobb says impatiently, almost as if he doesn’t still owe wages and damages on the last job Eames had been stupid enough to take on for him. 

“I always wanted to be famous,” with a wink and a quick flickering cascade of cards from one hand to the other. Cobb eyes them, face creasing ominously; he’s never approved of them, probably has a rule about it somewhere. (Cobb’s rules are legendary in the business, numbered in order like the word of god, but the one rule that seems to supersede them all is the one that says that Cobb can break any of them he likes, and no way is Eames missing out on _that_ action.) There’s just something compelling about it, about walking on the edge of reality, not knowing what’s real until he’s home and safe and checking which card he’d pulled out of the deck that morning. 

“Infamous,” Cobb’s companion says. Eames wants to call him Otto; there’s something about the combed lines carefully gelled into his hair that brings to mind aquatic mammals and David Attenborough’s soothing voice. 

“Infamy,” Eames intones mournfully, “they’ve got it in for me.” Then, with a quicksilver change of expression and body language and tone – the sort that belongs to the forger and the madman – he rocks his weight forward and rests his forearms on his knees, grinning up at Otto his very best grin. “Was it the Italian Contessa and the very small stepladder?” 

The line of Otto’s mouth relaxes, the faintest traces of softness that leave Eames’ own mouth inexplicably dry. “Budapest,” he says. It takes a moment to process before Eames’ fingers tighten involuntarily – no one was supposed to _know_ about that – and he watches with a numb sort of resignation as plastic coated cards scatter across the gritty concrete floor.

When his foot catches under the leg of (apparently) Arthur’s chair, later, Eames swears it’s an accident. Almost entirely.

 

**2.**

Eames almost doesn’t recognise Arthur, the next time. His wardrobe has improved by leaps and bounds, and if it weren’t for the never changing accessories – 

“No one wears a frown in Las Vegas, darling,” he murmurs, close enough that his breath would be stirring Arthur’s hair if it weren’t so very tightly controlled. 

“The day I take fashion advice from you, Eames,” Arthur says without turning, without even looking, “is the day I let someone shoot me in the head.” 

“Again?” 

The sigh, a quick rush of breath, is barely audible; he doesn’t like that. It hints at a lack of pantomime, a resignation to his presence which isn’t the sort of reaction he wants at all. He brings his hand up to catch the barest hint of alcohol on Arthur’s breath.

“What are you - ?”

“For luck.” Arthur finally turns his head, and there’s really no defence against the line of his jaw, almost as devastating against the flashing lights and brash voices of the casino as it is turned unconsciously against the frayed back of a lawn chair. He doesn’t say anything, just reaches up quicker than Eames would credit and picks up the red die from his palm, flipping it between his fingers and calculating – to the nth decimal, Eames wouldn’t wonder – the barest imperfections in its weight. 

“I don’t know why I’m surprised,” he says, without emotion, but there’s a rattling clatter that’s louder than any coins from the entrance; the sharp thin spine-tracing of a scream. 

“Hush, dear,” says Eames, “they’re playing our song.” And they whirl and race in opposite directions almost as if it’s been choreographed. 

It’s the last time he sees that die in a while. (That’s absolutely what he’s missing more.)

 

 **3.**

_A man, breaking his journey between one place and another, at a third place of no name, character, population, or significance sees a unicorn cross his path and disappear._

Eames chokes himself awake, the same way that a gun shot leaves a ghost ache in the shoulder and the poison gas some chemists have worked with catches in the throat. For a moment or two he braces himself over the cheap plastic arm of the lawn chair and heaves in stuttering breaths, waiting for his body to reject the water that never quite existed. When he’s coughed a couple of times (mouth too dry to spit) he slumps back into his chair; finds his eyes falling involuntarily on Arthur, and apparently unwilling to turn themselves away. 

_That in itself is startling, but there are precedents for this sort of mystical encounter, or rather, a choice of persuasions to put it down to fancy, until – “My god!” shouts a second man, “I must be dreaming! I thought I just saw a unicorn!”_

Arthur is busy with his cannula, and that would be an end to it – except for the faintest trace of colour in his cheeks. The subtleties to his mouth (his oddly soft mouth) that suggest less ‘set’ than ‘held in check’, subtleties that it would take a decent forger to notice. Eames is more than a decent forger. 

“Arthur?” he asks, and his voice hasn’t forgotten the near drowning so easily as his body, upon waking. The sandpaper grate of it pulls Arthur’s expression into a wince, and maybe it was more than just – maybe after all – 

He fumbles the coin from his pocket and flips it once, twice. Heads. 

_At which point a dimension is added which makes the experience as alarming as it will ever be._

A third time: heads. 

Cobb is awake now, putting pressure on his forearm as he tugs out his cannula, coming over to Eames’ station specifically to loom. “Be more careful,” he says, more accusing than anything. “If Arthur hadn’t know how to resuscitate you - ”

Tails. 

(And the barest grateful light in Arthur’s expression informs Eames in no uncertain terms that now that’s all it will ever have been.) 

_A third witness, you understand, adds no new dimension, only spreads it thinner, and a fourth thinner still, and the more witnesses there are, the thinner it spreads and the more reasonable it becomes until it is as thin as reality – the name we give to the common experience. “Look! Look!” recites the crowd. “A horse, with an arrow in its forehead! It must have been mistaken for a deer!”_

“I’m sorry it wasn’t a unicorn,” Eames mutters, half under his breath. “It would have been nice to have unicorns.”

 

**3b.**

(There is a gentle clattering rattle that follows, the barest glimpse of red in Arthur’s palm. Eames, it would appear, hasn’t quite got his breath back yet.)

 

**4.**

Mombasa.

“I see your spelling hasn’t improved,” Cobb says. And: 

“Piss off,” Eames says, because now Cobb – Cobb’s subconscious - _knows_. And it’s the hardest held of Cobb’s damned rules that Cobb’s subconscious is not to be trusted. He’d been sorry to hear about Mal. And: 

The unpleasant stickiness of cobwebs coalesces around the poker chip. (In his dreams, he doesn’t make such petty mistakes, so it’d worked for him. It’s all or nothing, in his dreams.)

He flips it to some poor sod walking in – dark hair, nice suit – and thinks about nothing at all.

 

**5.**

With the take on Saito’s job being what it was, Eames could very easily spend the rest of his life with fingers that are no lighter than anyone else’s. Could gamble no more than anyone else on his rainy little island, Saturday nights in front of the telly with six numbers in hand.

It was never about the money, of course.

So if Arthur were to take the time to find him, it would be reasonable that he’d find him here. That he’d slide, besuited and delectable as ever, into a chair just beside Eames’, slide slender fingers around his wrist and pull his hand up to breathe lightly over the dice that rest there. Eames’ other hand drops without thinking to his pocket, to the mah-jong tile resting there, but he doesn’t check it. Why would he? (It’s all or nothing, in his dreams.)

“For luck,” Arthur says, and his voice makes Eames blink, because a hallucination wouldn’t have quite so precisely the right flat tone. He tips the dice into Arthur’s palm and watches the slightest frown form as he weighs them, rolls them, and Eames takes the loss of his chips with equanimity because it was never about the money, anyway.

“You took the only one I ever had a fondness for,” he says, pushing to his feet with confidence that Arthur will follow.

“I still have it, if you want it back,” Arthur says.

“And I always thought you weren’t one for risks,” only he pushes open the metal bar of the fire door, shoves into the cold air with Arthur following, not a single question asked.

“I trust you,” Arthur says.

 

**+1**

It isn’t precisely that he’s stopped dreaming, only that he can never relax in them quite the same way, because he never fully loosens his control. He dreams of apocalypses and coffee shops and office jobs and superheroes, and for each Eames adopts a face to suit the occasion. Forges his way through sleeping as much as waking, effortlessly navigates dream floes made from ice-water and mirrors and whichever face he chooses, smiling widely back at him.

The ridiculous thing has always been that Eames had never _needed_ a totem. Forgers never do.

So he indulges, admittedly. Barks his skin on the rough brick wall of the alley behind the casino, threading his fingers into Arthur’s hair to break it from its crisp perfection, disrupting his theory that the comb tracks are the very same ones that sat there the day that they met. If he can only have it when he is sleeping then he _will_ have it when he’s sleeping, will take what bare reflection he can have of Arthur and drown himself in it.

Arthur’s chin tips up without prompting, which is as good an indication as any, because when it comes to Eames, Arthur never does anything without a fight. Not that he is acquiescent - Eames’ subconscious has too much practice with him to do anything so out of character - but the chosen battleground is dominance and Arthur presses up into the kiss like he’ll die for it.

He intends, he fully intends when he eventually pulls away - disheveled and panting and tilted off axis, leaning into Arthur like gravity - he intends to perfectly reflect whatever expression is on Arthur’s face, because he is just as delightfully irascible in dreams as he is in reality (because this has never just been about the way that he looks).

Only Arthur is the only one of them with that particular dimpled grin; Eames’ face doesn’t change at all.

**Author's Note:**

> With many thanks to ceitfianna and bleep0bleep.
> 
> I can be found on tumblr [here](http://tumblr.villainny.com/)


End file.
